


Capacity

by palimpsestus



Series: Hidden in His Coat Is His Tin Right Hand [1]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-13
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-06 14:18:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5420267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/palimpsestus/pseuds/palimpsestus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>*Spoilers for the mission: Institutionalised* </p><p>The Nick that-used-to-be had always found her attractive, at least as she’d been as he’d first met her, with all that perfect hair and those soft curves barely contained beneath scavenged armour and leather, and the socialite airs and graces that spoke of a kind of background he’d never come close to. But then so did half the men and women they came across in the Commonwealth. Nora would never have been short a bed warmer, if she hadn’t been missing her husband so fierce.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Nick That Was

**Author's Note:**

> Really though, big spoilers for the mission "Institutionalised" - if you haven't got that far don't read it. I managed to play that mission totally unspoiled and I was gobstruck.

They had been in Diamond City for less than an hour when she cut her hair. The long tresses fell in curls, the scissors whispering as they sliced through the last soft thing about her. Nick wasn’t sure he remembered the last time he saw her in clean clothes, or a dress.

Not that it should have bothered him, not that he could rightly say why it did. He wasn’t Nick Valentine, not really, and she was no well coifed pre-war lawyer that he might have crossed swords with across a court room.

But the hair falling to the worn boards bothered him nonetheless. Since her return to the Railroad she had been so quiet, her report on the Institute terse, not even cracking a smile for PAM.

Beside him, Deacon rematerialized with a bowl of noodles and a disguise so filthy Nick could feel the non-existent muscles in his face desperately twitching to wrinkle his nose. Why give a man the ability to sense when he couldn’t express his disgust?

“What you thinking?” Deacon asked, and nodded his head once to the woman in the barber’s chair.

Nick scowled. “Thinking _I’ll_ deal with it,” he growled, his spine digging a furrow in one of the supporting beams of the noodle shack.

“That’s fair,” Deacon said easily. “But someone’s gotta.” He turned, peering at Nick over the top of his broken shades. “Because if Des figures out Charmer’s lying about something . . .”

“I said I’d deal with it,” Nick repeated, softer. At this time in the morning there was only the old bot to overhear, but Desdemona wasn’t to be underestimated.

“See that you do, Nick.” Deacon’s accent slipped for a moment, true worry shining through, and then he bolted like a raddoe, disappearing into the streets of Diamond City. Nora had tossed some caps to the barber and was distractedly running her hand through her hair, her fingers coming free just after the nape of her neck, and he could see her frown as it happened. Whatever she’d found at the Institute, whatever price she’d paid to come back to the Railroad with news of their Patriot and news of more synths who wanted to escape, there had been something  that hadn’t made it out of that place with her.

Hope, maybe.

He caught her eye and gestured with his damaged hand, leading the way through the alleyways to his office. To his relief she followed along behind him, as quiet as she’d been for the journey between the Railroad’s headquarters and Diamond City. A small pack of children darted past them on their way to school and he sneaked a look back at her. Normally children would set her on edge, make her smiles tight and forced, but today her expression just looked as bone weary as before.

“Reckon you could make use of the bed,” he said when he stopped to unlock his office door. “We hauled out of North Church pretty quick.” The lock popped with a click and he held the door open for her. She brushed past, her shoulder brushing against his chest and alerting hundreds of sensors to her proximity, where algorithms assessed the danger to his continued functioning, and though his higher processes could discount it, the proximity sensors kept feeding the same message. Time to run a diagnostic perhaps. He often did around Nora. For the whole week she’d been in the institute he’d run diagnostics on his predictive algorithms. Every day she’d been away he couldn’t decide if he expected she’d come back to him victorious, or he’d never see her again. And both options felt equally as likely at any moment. Bugs in the system.  “Maybe we head back up to Sanctuary for a while?” It had been over a month since they’d last left the settlement, and he wondered how-

“No,” she snapped, and a shudder went straight through her, closing her eyes and drawing her arms tightly around her waist.

“Okay,” Nick said mildly, and was sure to lock the door again behind them.

Nora shed her armour quickly as soon as she’d clocked the room was safe, dropping pack, gauntlets, bracers and overcoat in a long trail towards his bed. The Nick-he- wasn’t had seen a trail of clothes leading towards his bed before, and was trying to signal parts that his synth body couldn’t replicate. The Nick-he-was had seen that hollow expression too often in other survivors though, and if his body could get chilled, it would have been.

 It had to come down to the boy, didn’t it? He thought she’d come back with the boy in tow or not at all. She’d thought that too, he was sure.  Her goodbyes to Sanctuary and the others before she’d headed to Tom’s invention had been only just shy of final. When he’d watched her step onto the platform, he was sure that Nick Valentine’s brain was telling his old synthetic heart to stop beating.

He picked up after her, placing her armour and weapons on a chair, and then he rifled around in his desk for the good bottle of red he’d been saving for an auspicious occasion.

Nora had shed everything but panties, bra and her white undershirt. Even Nick-that-was wouldn’t have found her vulnerability appealing. She sat on his bed, her knees tucked up against her chest, staring blankly at the wall. Her hand reached for the bottle he offered and she took a long, thirsty swig, her throat bobbing as she did so.

“You don’t need to tell me,” Nick said, and sat on the stair, the wood creaking just a little under the weight of his metal skeleton. “But you can, if you want to.”

She swiped the back of her hand over her lips, staining them that bloody red of wine. She blinked just enough to make him think she was fighting tears.

“God knows I want to,” she whispered. “But . . .”

“Your boy,” he said softly. He imagined the child he’d seen in Kellog’s memories held prisoner, imagined Nora holding the child close to her breast, begging for his freedom. He imagined the boy dead, sprawled on the floor and bleeding, but he thought his Nora might have wreaked and almighty vengeance if it had got that far. He wondered if she’d seen her son at all. He was glad Desdemona hadn’t asked, but he cursed the woman for expecting the cause to be more important than one’s own flesh and blood.

Even the Nick-that-is  could understand that.

“Whatever you’re not saying, you’re not saying it to protect him,” Nick said, and he held up his good hand where she would normally protest, but instead she remained silent, the bottle resting against her thigh. “You don’t need to tell me anything,” he repeated.

She sighed heavily and sagged back against the wall, her knees relaxing and falling so she was sitting cross legged. “Nothing’s simple,” she muttered, staring at the wall just above Nick’s head. And she took another slug of wine. “Nothing’s fair.”

He didn’t have much of an answer for that.

“Nick?” her voice cracked a little and he let his gaze flick to her hand where her thumb was rubbing the gold band around her finger. “What are you?” she asked, her voice raspy with dampened emotion.

He studied her for a moment. The Nick that-used-to-be had always found her attractive, at least as she’d been as he’d first met her, with all that perfect hair and those soft curves barely contained beneath scavenged armour and leather, and the socialite airs and graces that spoke of a kind of background he’d never come close to. But then so did half the men and women they came across in the Commonwealth. Nora would never have been short a bed warmer, if she hadn’t been missing her husband so fierce.

The Nick-that-was was thinking she was close to needing some kind of affection. The Nick-that-was had seen this kind of thing before, when the wife found out the husband really was screwing the nanny, when the brother realised he had been cut out of the inheritance, when the chips were down and you realised your hand wasn’t as strong as you thought it had been.

It would have been nothing for the Nick-that-was to reach up to take the bottle of wine from her hand, to let his fingers graze her exposed thigh, and apologise without meaning it. The Nick-that-was would have had an unutterable confidence in an ability to make a good looking woman feel good for an hour or so. But Nick was none of that now. His hands were polymer and metal. He wasn’t even sure how they’d feel to her, how lifelike his skin was. The sensors embedded in his frame were so sensitive the difference to him felt like an infinite gap.

What was he? That was as good a question as any.

“Are you real?” she pressed, but not with any demand. Instead she drank again, and screwed her eyes shut briefly. “Do you feel?”

“If you cut me do I not leak servo fluid?” he asked wryly, and she grimaced. “This is an interesting line of question, counsel,” he said, and that sparked something a little like life in her eyes.

“The line is pertinent,” she mumbled, “If your honour would allow me the leeway to continue the questioning.”

“I’m . . .” Nick trailed off. Since seeing Winter fall, he’d been less sure of this himself. “I’m good,” he said at last, shrugging his shoulders helplessly. His answer hadn’t pleased her greatly, he saw. “I try  to be,” he amended.

She unfolded her legs and scooted towards the edge of the mattress, clasping the wine bottle by the neck. “But why are you good? Because you were programmed that way?” She poked a finger at the air between them. “Because that’s what Nick was?”

If he’d still had a stomach, and not a chemical aerobic digestion chamber that could provide his unit power, it would have sunk. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Okay,” she said softly, and crossed her legs underneath her again, like she was settling in for a night’s watch. “Imagine, hypothetically, I had learned something at the Institute. Imagine there are some choices ahead of me. Imagine . . .” she stopped to drink again, screwing her eyes shut. “Imagine I was no longer sure who was the enemy. Who was real and who was not.”

Nick sucked in a deep breath and let it all out in a rush. His skeletal fingers were patting at his pocket for a cigarette and lighting it even before he registered the action. He stuck the end between his lips and watched her. “Hypothetically, counsel,” he said carefully.

“Hypothetically,” she nodded, and met his gaze with only a hint of unsteadiness.

“Hypothetically that’s a lot of pressure to put on a man,” he exhaled a puff of smoke, watched it curl around the bare bulb above them. “Finer minds than mine have tried to prove free will.”

Her low, throaty chuckle had a hint of the hysterical about it and she drew her palm over her faces, peering at him through splayed fingers. “I’m sorry, Jesus, sorry, Nick,” she mumbled, shaking her head. “It’s unfair of me.”

He knew that if he was human, if he was real, his mouth would be dry. He wanted to drink, to feel that instant relaxation flood his systems, though it was no more real than he was. A remnant of Nick’s biological programming that had somehow made its way over to his silicone chip. “You don’t ever have to be fair to me, doll,” he was saying, his voice modulated low in his own auditory sensors. She frowned at him, the kind of pretty, socialite frown that had been studied and calculated to influence important people at important dinners, and now came to her natural. He often found himself wondering how someone like her had ended up as a lawyer in suburbia, and he suspected there was a sorely disappointed family somewhere in a big house. She rarely mentioned her family, only the occasional comment “Mother would be so proud,” when she’d done something the old world would have thought unladylike. By contrast, she’d broken down in tears walking through the rubble of Nate’s family’s house.  He’d sat with her on the broken concrete and wrapped his arm around her shoulders, holding her and rocking her gently, while Dogmeat whined and begged at her feet.

Why had he held her then? Was that the old Nick’s programming or his own? He certainly hadn’t had a choice in the matter. He would do anything to make her feel just a little less awful. Whatever bug in the system it was, whatever mix of his self-preservation matrix and the old-Nick’s love of loyalty, it manifested in her, entirely.

“You don’t need to be fair to me,” he said. “I owe you more than I can repay.”

She drank again, like his faith in her was less than reassuring. Her fist was clenched around the bottle neck.

Free will was a strange thing. The Nick-that-was was dying for a taste of that wine, and that need brought Nick to his feet, had him sitting on the mattress beside her, taking the bottle for a sip before he could remind himself the alcohol would do nothing for him, and maybe she didn’t want to be so close to him. But as he drank, she let her cheek rest against his shoulder and looped her arm around his.

“Do I need to prove that all synths have free will, or would you settle for just me?”

“There’s nothing ‘just’ about you,” she murmured, accepting the bottle he handed back to her.

Nick sighed. He knew that if the old Nick had ever met her the man would have been singular about pursuing her, no husband, baby or fine breeding would have stopped him. “I have free will,” he mumbled, “because I act against my programming. I do things Nick wouldn’t do. I do things that I don’t want to do, because it’s the good thing to do.” If he’d been human, the deep breath he’d sucked in would have hurt because of the hammering of his heart, but that was a coolant pump working overtime. He wasn’t human. He didn’t feel that kind of heartache.

Then why was it so damned hard to tell her?

Nora had shifted. She had her legs curled to the side now, her body turned to face him, and her elbow still hooked around his. The wine bottle sat in the space between their hips, resting against his thigh. He couldn’t resist turning his head to smell the crown of her hair, that strangely pleasant and heady aroma that he couldn’t quite remember any other person having. Jenny, what the old-Nick remembered of Jenny, she smelled of rosewater and that daisy perfume. Nothing like that here, just the smell of Nora, the smell of the Wasteland.

“Nick?” she asked, her words resonating in his chest. “What do you do?” She sounded so curious, so innocently unaware of him.

“Nick Valentine would, uh, have liked you,” he said. Somehow his fingers were brushing the back of her hand, tracing delicate circles over her knuckles. “You’re just his type, doll, even when you are playing the damsel once in a while. If I was just the echo of him, I’d be . . . trying something I shouldn’t.”

They both stared at his fingers atop her hand, and for a moment it seemed as though he had gotten away with it, until she leapt to her feet as though she had been burned, pacing the short distance across the floor boards with her arms wrapped tight around her waist. “What are you saying, Nick?”

He rescued the wine and held it between his mismatched palms, staring at his feet planted on the boards. “I’m saying I exercise my free will, by not doing what-”

“What the old Nick Valentine would do?” she snapped, her voice taking on a hysterical edge once more as she paced the floor in front of him, heedless of her undress, of his pain, her disgust evident in the crease on her pretty nose, the turn of her red lips, and in the cock of her hips when she came to a stop in front of him. “Are you saying you . . . you think would be programmed to, what?” She fumbled for the words, like he’d never heard her struggle, “Lure me to your bed?”

He hung his head. “But I don’t,” he whispered. “I _wouldn’t_.”

“That’s your free will?” she demanded, planting her hands on her hips and jerking her chin upwards like he was lower than something a raider had stepped in. “I don’t understand, Nick.”

Didn’t she? She didn’t understand how she made him wish for a human body more than anything. Wish for a human heart that could feel what he knew he felt for her? “What I’m saying is that you’re the best partner I ever had. And I will be there for you no matter what, no matter how I feel about you, I will be there for you.” He raised his gaze to find her staring at him, open mouthed.

“And how do you feel about me?” she whispered.

If, until then, there hadn’t been a word for it, his processes all came to the same conclusion. “I love you,” he said, and he wished he wasn’t able to see so clearly how she flushed, how the very idea of it made her mouth part in fear. “That’s how I know I have free will, because if I was just Nick, I wouldn’t know it was wrong. If I was just a bot, I wouldn’t feel like this. But that is how I know. I have free will.”

And the cat was well and truly out of the bag, out of the city, out of the damned Wasteland . . .


	2. Labourer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He obeyed, like an old bot should. Didn’t the Slavs call them slaves after all? Damned fine job he was doing of the free will argument.

Nora  raised her hand to her mouth, her fingertips playing across her lips. “I don’t,” she closed her eyes briefly, confused.

The servos in his fingers were whirring, as near to an itch as he could feel. He wanted to hold her, apologise, insist it was a joke. Anything to keep her from _knowing_ what he felt.

“I don’t understand why,” she began again, eyelids fluttering open,  “How you know it’s . . .  ‘wrong’?” She frowned. “How is love . . .” the word seemed to strangle her, catching in her throat.

How does a hunk of tin love? How did the Institute manage to translate that when it couldn’t even give him a heartbeat? How could he separate it from the old-Nick? How could he presume to consider himself anything like her? “There are things I’m just not capable of,” he said, staring at his uneven hands. “Things I cannot do. But I _can_ feel.”

“And . . .” he heard her lick her lips. “The other things . . . They’re necessary for love?” she rasped.

God how he did love her. Loved every part of her that even now was trying to spare his feelings. “Necessary for you,” he said, looking at her once more. She was staring back at him, her feelings warring on her face, much like they had when she’d first seen him, that odd mix of fear, disgust and pity.

Abruptly, she paced again, reaching the end of the room and whirling to face him, her cheeks bright red again. “What makes you think that?” she challenged with another jerk of her head.

How to say that he’d watched her so intently, that he’d studied every little thing that made her smile, every stretch of her limbs, seen what she liked, and seen her fear when she’d first met him. “It’s just who you are” he said, and shrugged his good shoulder. You’re beautiful and you deserve beauty, he thought. You are fierce and you deserve passion. You are perfect. You deserve as close to that as you can get.

“Do you think I . . .” she hesitated, scrunching up her face as her thoughts raced ahead of her. “You think I’m . . . that I . . .”  She stopped stammering, stretched her neck and relaxed her shoulders, a careful mask of control slipping over her whole body. She might have been in a court room, or a upstate grand homee with gin in hand. “I think we’ve skipped a step,” she said, her voice pleasant and cool again. “Maybe several. What do you mean by,” and her voice shook just a little, “ ‘love me’?”

First you ask me to prove free will, now you ask me to define love, and I’ll try damn it, because that’s what love is. He could feel himself grinning at her, fondly frustrated. “It may not be what a human’s love is,” he admitted, “because I ain’t that. But I would die for you. Or,” he grimaced, “risk obsolescence for you, if that’s a better turn of phrase. I’d die for your son. Hell I’d even have died for Nate, if I could, just to make you . . . feel a little bit better.”

The god-awful sympathy returned to her face, the pity and revulsion.

“And I don’t what choices you have to make, doll, and hell, maybe I won’t agree with you in the end, but . . . I will want to. And I will try to understand.”

She held up a hand, and when he was silent she mulled this over. “That sounds like . . . something,” she said softly.

“Like the deranged ramblings of a robot?”

The sympathy returned and she padded towards him. He had to crane his neck to look at her. “You don’t want to love me?” she asked, an odd note in her voice. “Or . . . you don’t think you should?”

“Oh . . .” he looked down, a view that was currently filled with the sweep of her legs, “ _Look_ at me,” he managed. “Is this,” he gestured to his face, “the face of a lover?”

He expected her to recoil, or protest too fast, but instead, she slowly eased around him, reclaiming her space beside him. His sensors picked up the heat of her body, the tiny differences in the way the mattress sunk, like a gravity pulling him toward her. She reached for the bottle, her fingers brushing his less sensitive skeletal ones, and she drank, not taking her eyes from his. When she lowered the bottle again, she had the smile of a lawyer who’d spotted a weakness. “Nick, uh, you drink, right? You smoke? Those things . . . they do nothing for you, right? Maybe make a negligible contribution to that organic battery of yours. So why do you do ‘em?”

“It’s the next best thing to being human, I guess,” he knew he was staring at the hollow of her collarbone, the place he most wanted to kiss so she would arch her back and laugh for him, but he couldn’t help it.

She was nodding. “You do them because you want to. Because you feel satisfaction when you get something you want, right?” She set the bottle down, the hem of her shirt riding up as she leaned over to reach the floor.

“Right, I guess?”

Nora smirked, sitting up on her knees. “So what do you want to do to me?”

“That’s not the kind of question you should ask,” but the servos in his limbs had him leaning toward her, his skeletal hand reaching for her newly-cropped hair, brushing the curls back from her face. He half thought it was her, not him, who closed the gap between them with a kiss, her lips hot and insistent on his.

It didn’t feel like it did in the old Nick’s memories, but it felt damned good enough. She was closer to him now, crawling into his lap, straddling his hips with her thighs and he curved his good arm down around her ass, holding her to him as she ran her hands down his shirt front, freeing him from tie and undoing the first few buttons until he tore his lips from hers to murmur “Don’t,”

She hesitated, her hands stilling for a moment, meeting his gaze with compassion and desire and not a hint of disgust at all. “Nick . . .” she breathed.

It was easier to just kiss her again, to turn so she was flipped to her back on the mattress, the springs protesting with a strained squeak, and to let his hands explore the flash of bare skin between her breast and hip. His sensors could feel what a human couldn’t, could feel the thump of blood through her major arteries, the exact temperature of the skin above her belly button, the tiny tremors as she suppressed the urge to grind her hips upwards into him. He kissed her lips once more, long, slow, commemorating every input in his tin skull forever, before kissing lower, that delightful dip above her collarbone, then the skin just beneath the hem of her shirt, and now her hip, which made her moan and clutch at the back of his head, curling her fist in his shirt collar. He tugged the panties aside and spared a single kind thought for the Institute that they had at least seen fit to grant him a tongue that he could use and, miracle that it was, taste with.

She was exquisite, that smell that was just her. Maybe as a human he’d never had the sensitivity, but this body could pinpoint the heady combination of humanity and perfection. Hell maybe it was the lack of mutated DNA. Who knew? He kept his damaged hand beneath him, propping his frame off of her legs and keeping the cold metal off her skin. With his good hand he explored the skin beneath her bra, tracing a thumb along the fabric, until he reached the clasp at the back and undid it with far more ease than he’d ever achieved with hands of flesh.

She chuckled, low in her throat, the sound resonating through her body, and he nipped with calculated gentleness at the plump flesh on the inside of her thigh. “No laughing now,” he growled, and kissed the reddened flesh to apologise. She shivered, her knee sliding up over his shoulder, her palm caressing his damaged cheek, his sensors shouting damage and proximity and the message getting confused like it always did. It was as near to ticklish as a robot could get, he thought, and leaned into her touch.

“Then no teasing,” she whispered.

He obeyed, like an old bot should. Didn’t the Slavs call them slaves after all? Damned fine job he was doing of the free will argument.

But for a little more time between her legs he’d sacrifice even that.


	3. The Oldest Puzzle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Whatever he was, whatever he could do, whatever he couldn’t . . . Nick could at least enjoy this.

Whatever he was, whatever he could do, whatever he couldn’t . . . Nick could at least enjoy this. He could dial down his processors, ignore the humming of the lightbulb that swung above them, discount the periodic hiss of an EM wave or ultraviolet flash, and just listen to the twostep of Nora’s racing heart as he explored every inch of her. He noted the places she liked, the curve of her breast and the inside of her wrist, and he also noted the places that made her still, the silvery scars beneath her belly, the tiny birthmark on her calf that begged to be kissed – and must have been kissed so often by another man. And he even noted the places he liked best, and indulged himself.

He didn’t even miss . . . it . . . quite as much as he thought he would. Her delicate fingers on his ragged skin was too much, too fast, too vulnerable, but how she kissed him and the heat of her body through his shirt, it was almost enough. How she ground against his hand, pinned between her body and his thigh, was absolutely enough. The repeated, almost predictable pattern of her flexing muscles was a cipher. The gasps from her lips a half heard song. The grip of her hand at the nape of his neck and the joint of his elbow was a proximal alarm that he could not ignore. Altogether a puzzle he could solve with a little effort and a little strain, until the solution worked itself out with a low grunt in Nora’s throat.

She collapsed back against the mattress, one arm flung up to shade her eyes, the other splaying over her chest, no doubt feeling the race of her heart. He took a moment to study her, the flush on her cheeks especially, and the blush on her skin. He’d seen how easily her skin reddened when she was working hard, and he hoped it was a sign of a job well done. He shifted his weight and reached up to ease a tangle of hair back from her forehead, and then, in for a penny in for a pound, he leaned down to kiss the skin he’d just cleared. He lingered, smelling her hair again, maybe one last time.

Her fist clenched around his shirt, “Stay,” she mumbled, her voice not entirely inviting.

“As long as you need,” he agreed, and leaned over her to reach for his discarded coat. He took longer than he needed to gather his coat and the wine bottle up, and then he arranged the coat over her in as grand a sheet as he could manage. He stretched out beside her again, propping his head up on his metal hand, crossing his legs at the ankle, and holding the bottle near. Just in case the sobs she was trying to stifle became anything else.

It was three minutes, twenty seconds and five milliseconds, give or take, before she managed to lower her hand and wipe her cheeks. She looked up at him, her eyes puffy, and managed a wan smile. “You have a cigarette?”

Obligingly, he balanced the bottle between their bodies and reached into his pocket. While she held it between her lips he lit the end, and her fingers shook only a little as she inhaled, pinched the filter, and exhaled a long plume that twirled up towards the rafters. She pillowed her head with her free hand and took another drag, staring up at the nothing above them. She exhaled again, and absently flicked the ash away from the mattress. He imagined her in a dingy bedsit back in her schooling days, smoking with another sharp minded law student, learning how to suck down the fire without a hint of a cough, all to disguise the mannerisms that marked her as different. Her gaze flicked to him and she offered her hand, her fingers loosely pinching the white end of the cigarette.

He leaned down, pursed his lips around the filter and breathed in, his lips brushing her knuckles, and somehow his hand ended up splayed over her stomach. She made a soft ‘hmm’ noise as it settled there and returned the cigarette to her mouth.

“How was it for you?” she asked with characteristic openness. Her curiosity was far better than her grief and he pretended to think about it. In the pause, his fingers ended up tracing a pattern on her belly.

“All I could hope for, and more,” he said, and was rewarded with a little smile at the corner of her lips.

“Flatterer,” she murmured.

He shook his head just a little. “And you?”

“Ha,” she offered him one last drag and when he refused she finished the cigarette with an almighty pull that lifted her chest, doing interesting things to her breasts beneath his coat, and then she held the smoke in while she stubbed the end out on the metal frame of the bed, and dropped it to the ground. When she exhaled, she folded both her arms behind her head. “First good thing that’s happened to me in a hundred and thirty eight days.” There was no disguising the bitterness there.

“I’m sorry,” he offered, automatically, and found himself stroking her hair with metal fingers.

She shrugged. “There’s not much joy out here.”

“You’re not ready to see it, but you will,” he said, and at this she curled up closer to him, pillowing her cheek against his check. “I’m just sorry I didn’t manage to argue free will.”

Nora craned her neck to get a better look at him. “I still don’t understand your thought process there,” she pronounced, her brows drawing together as she smirked at him. She was mocking him, he realised, and he felt a little easier about it.

“Come on,” he said, “this is . . .” he hesitated and glanced away, only to be brought back by the gentle pressure of her hand against his chest. “This isn’t me, is it?” he asked her quietly, the words difficult to say. “It’s . . . the old Nick. This isn’t something a machine does.”

“Hmm.” She was thinking about it, turning the idea over in her head. While she pondered, she let her head fall back against his arm, twined her legs with his under the coat so they were completely entangled. He couldn’t leave her easily, even if he wanted to. “Can I tell you something?” She waited for his affirmation before continuing. “I didn’t realise you were so shy . . . about this,” and she reached up to touch his face. He leaned into the pressure of her fingertips, just a millimetre or so. “About the bot thing. I so rarely remember that you’re a synth, and even when you bring it up . . .” she sighed. “I guess with Winter I just thought you were emotional. Maybe I was too wrapped up in my problems.”

“Your problems are pretty big,” he said dryly.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I do that sometimes. I always have. Nate said it was my mother who taught me not to listen.”

Nick wasn’t sure that was true, but there were bigger things to argue about tonight. “You know I’m not human, doll,” he said. “Whatever we do, I’m . . .”

“You know, neither’s Codsworth. Or Curie for that matter.”

“That’s different,” he said immediately, and found himself wondering why even as she raised an eyebrow at his conviction.

“Yes I’m sure it is,” she said. “You can’t martyr yourself on their humanity, can you?” She scowled at the ceiling. He felt the urge to run a fingertip down into the dimple in her cheek, and seeing what else they’d been up to recently, he indulged himself, and she pursed her lips in mock irritation, turning her face enough to capture his fingertip in her mouth, nipping enough to alarm his sensors to the potential damage. It occurred to him that he had been so preoccupied with wondering if she would that he hadn’t stopped to think if he should. The next time she flirted with a trader to get a little more bang for her caps, or teased Macready for his obvious schoolboy crush, Valentine would be grinding his titanium jaw to dust. That had always been a bug in the old Nick’s programming too, a biological impulse that he might have hoped a silicone brain had been able to overcome.

Nora laced her fingers with his and sighed. Perhaps she had come to her senses and started to regret, he thought, though a small part of him said he doubted it. She snuggled in closer beside him. “Sometimes,” she said in a low, conspirital voice, “I imagine us meeting before the war.”

He felt his fingers twitch against hers. Did she imagine the rakish and charming dark haired Valentine with his famed dark eyes and lanky limbs, the heartbreaker of Boston commons and courthouses alike? He wished, with fervour that hurt, that she could see him as he’d been.

“I imagine it’s in a court room maybe, and I think I’m defending a perp of yours. I imagine you getting so pissed off with me,” she chuckled. “Maybe I get the case dropped, and the only way I can make you speak to me again is to buy you a gin somewhere.”

He could imagine that too, Nora crossing her stockinged pins as she perched on his desk, a pressed navy skirt suit wrinkling just a little as she leaned forward, pouring her words like honey as she teased him into submission. He could practically see the other guys not knowing where to look, and hear her laugh as her heels clicked away from the office, knowing full well the effect she’d had on the office.

Much like how she sometimes sat on his desk in her armour and overcoat, teasing Ellie while he tried to catch up on the work he’d left behind trailing her across the Commonwealth and back. Much like how Ellie shook her head and rolled her eyes when Nora rested her rifle on her shoulders and cocked one hip in exaggerated Hollywood style, and how he always followed her out again.

“But it’s you I’m imagining,” Nora was saying, “You, not the man I don’t know.” She reached up to touch his cheek. “This ugly mug,” she said softly. “The one that I know. The one that has . . .” her eyes closed briefly, “Begun to feel a little like home.”

Nick wanted to hold her closer but she was already as close to his synthetic skin as she could get without damaging them both. Instead, he rested his cheek against the crown of her hair and ached for her undeservedly broken heart. “Nora,” he murmured, “Just how long have you been flirting with me?”

“Oh . . .” she affected an airy tone, “Since we climbed out of Vault 114, but not in any real earnestness until you took me to Kellogg, and you asked me how I was.” She had curled so tightly against her chest that he couldn’t see her face. He remembered her that night by blimp light, her tears still silvery on her cheeks, her fingers bloody from pulling cybernetic components from Kellogg’s body. How long had that been? Three months at least. “But I didn’t fall in love with you until I heard Kellogg speak with your voice,” she whispered it quieter than a human could have heard.

“What?” he whispered back into the crown of her hair, nearly as quiet.

“I thought . . . I couldn’t kill you if you stood in my way. And I didn’t know what I was going to do.” She let out a shaky breath that was sure was a stifled sob. “And now my son’s asked me to do something . . . and I think you will try to stand in my way. And I don’t know what to do.”

Her . . . son? She had found him? Why hadn’t she brought him? His mind raced as he kept a steady pattern of his fingers stroking  the newly shortened ends of her hair.

“So I’m afraid. And I need to know. If I do this. If I help my son. And if you stand against me. Is that your free will? That he says you don’t have, that will break my heart? He’s old you see, Shaun, he’s older than me. He’s the director of the Institute, the one responsible for all these kidnappings. He might even be responsible for leaving you in a garbage dump somewhere. I couldn’t stop thinking about that when I stayed there. And the way they treat their synths . . .” she shuddered so hard that the bed shook and Nick had to brace his body against the mattress. He was making soothing noises, like he did to Dogmeat when the pup got scared, but her stream of consciousness didn’t slow. “But he’s my son. He looks like Nate’s father, Jesus he looks so much like Nate’s father. I didn’t see it at first but . . . that nose, that . . . caveman brow. I always teased Nate about that. But everything is so clean there. The beds are soft, there’s no gunfire in the night. That’s where my son grew up, where there is green and white and .  . . slaves. I kept thinking about that stupid room too, the one back in Sanctuary.  I still have his cot, and he’s an old man. I’ve been collecting those toys, those comics . . . while he’s been watching me run around the Commonwealth. He didn’t mention you. Maybe that was a courtesy. My mother would have loved him,” this last was said very darkly and she lifted her head at last, looking up into his eyes. “He was _so_ like her, Nick. He doesn’t look like her much, but the way he talks. The way he acts.  So sure of himself. So sure he was better than everyone else.” She rolled onto her back and blinked up at the ceiling. “How’s that for free will, Nick? Two hundred years after the end of the world and my mother’s genes are still out there creating an elite.”

Tears were rolling down her cheeks again, silent and slow, her eyes growing redder.

“Biological programming,” he murmured.

“I don’t know what to do, Nick,” she murmured again, her voice thin. “I have no good options left. Maybe free will isn’t as important as the options we have.”

He let his metal fingers tangle in her hair, watching the way the silver slipped through the short curls. “Would it really make it easier if I could prove I had the capacity to make my own choices?”

 

She brushed her knuckles over her cheeks and shook her head once, levering her body into a sitting position. She reached for the wine and took a slug, her spine curving beneath the bare skin of her back. Nick reached for it with cold metal fingers without thinking, and she shivered a little as he traced the pattern of her vertebrae. He was going to struggle not to touch her, to remember that whatever happened behind closed doors might not be what should happen outside of them. Free will indeed. His body was not his own, nor were his choices, and really neither were hers. Hormones, biology, or just the imprint of them, dictated all they did.

“No,” Nora whispered. “I love Shaun regardless of whether his argument is right or wrong.” She looked at him over her shoulder. “And his arguments are wrong, regardless of how I love him.”

He sat too, his motorised muscles making a smoother job of it than hers had. He wrapped his bare hand around her chest and kissed her cheek, feeling the way she pressed against him.

“Nick?”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“I lost my son,” she whispered, and the tears began again, earnest, loud and ragged.

“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” he murmured, but didn’t think she heard, and they sat together until long after she had cried herself hoarse, until she slept cradled in his arms into the afternoon.

 

 

Valentine couldn’t say he woke, exactly, but he stopped running diagnostics when she left the bed late in the evening. He turned his full attention to her as she dressed and watched how she stooped to strap her armour onto her limbs, how she pulled at her hair to free it from the back of the leather chestpiece. No need to do that now, her gesture was cut short like the brunette locks, and she hesitated, her fingertips tracing the collar line of the armour, before she steadily stripped the cumbersome pieces off and arranged them on the chair. Instead she unpacked the warm jacket stolen from a dead Brotherhood scribe, and paired it with a pair of sturdy boots taken from a raider. She hauled them on, one at a time, and strapped  her holster to her thigh. By the time she was done she looked, more than ever, like a woman born to this wasteland.

She straightened to catch him watching her. “I need to talk to Des about something. I’ll meet up with Deacon in the market. You should stay here.”

He was about to protest as she took a step towards him and leaned down to kiss his forehead. She replaced his hat as she did so, and gave him a lopsided smile. “I’ll be fine, Valentine,” she murmured. “I need you to check in with Piper, then meet me back here. We have to go speak to Virgil.”

He settled for a nod and watched her exit, leaving her armour sitting on the chair. Not like anything left in the Commonwealth could hurt her.

“Well, Valentine,” he asked himself as he heard the door close behind her. “You gonna lie around here moping or are you gonna choose to do something about it?”

He at least had the capacity to choose the best of a bad set of options.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this came out of my huge Valentine crush and my frustration that you could't immediately seek out his opinion on the Institute after you learned the truth. And the smut was there because that's what I do. Also apparently I do screeds of dialogue. Oops.

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this and it very quickly became apparent it was getting monstrously long for a one-shot intended to explore Nick's free will, so I've split it into three chapters, at present, and will post the rest as soon as I can. As it is, the Wasteland stories have taken up far too much of the time I should be spending on the writing that actually pays my bills *guilty palim*


End file.
